What Can Learn from PER: Physics Education Research?

Abstract

I believe that most teachers develop a belief in a set of pedagogical practices. As we teach, we try different ways to teach topics and then judge how successful the methods were. After several years, we have a compilation of techniques in our teaching toolbox. New teachers are at a disadvantage because they have fewer prior experiences to draw upon. Luckily, there is a group of physicists and physics educators who are researching how students learn physics, and have been able to show evidence of effective education practices in physics. They field of study is called PER: Physics Education Research. I asked Chandralekha Singh, one of the leaders in PER, to summarize some of the most relevant PER findings and her response follows.